EEPP Meddelin

The Company

Empresas Publicas de Medellin is a very large public corporation from Medellin, Colombia. They provide utilities services, such as energy, gas, water, wastewater, phone (including mobile), internet, pager and cable TV services for more than 4.5 million people, around Antioquia and Bogota.

In 1999, EPM was awarded as “The best XX century Company in Colombia”, due to their organization, technological development and social contributions.

The Migration Project

In 1999, EPM contracted XSEED Software to do the migration project of their corporate commercial application (billing, financial management, customer care ...) that was written on LINC II and COBOL and based on UNISYS Mainframe. The targeted technology was Oracle and Visual Basic, based on Intel Servers with MS Windows NT as operational system. EPM had an Unisys mainframe installed base of: an A18, model 522 for development and test, and a ClearPath NX 4521, model 51 for deployment. The user community at their network had more than 4000 connected PCs.

The migration project consisted of six applications; those applications were written with LINC II / EAE, COBOL and WFL programs. The Unisys DMSII database supported approximately 150 GB of operational data. More than one million LDL LINC II lines of code and near one million COBOL lines of code were migrated to Visual Basic.

Adopting XMM (XSEED Migration Methodology) the application was converted, tested, certificated and deployed with minor impacts for the end users and application analysts. Technical team and end users are very comfortable in using and maintaining migrated application, once XSEED migration approach keeps same way of programming and same functionality as they use to have before migration. This is one of the great advantages of XSEED Tools. Programming in XSEED is similar as programming in LINC/EAE/LDA, additionally XSEED implements many Open-SQL and others logic commands to better usage of open technology.

For the end users, the perception have been that the interface was improved, becoming more friendly and easier to use than the old one, but they still recognize their “old” application. They needed less than one week of training to learn how to use the new application.

In July, 2000 the last and more important application has been deployed. This application included billing of all services provided by EPM and financial management. Four applications have been reengineering in a single one. This application updates approximately 60000 invoices per cycle in a batch routine. In addition, it supports 100 thousand on line transactions daily submitted by over than 1200 users.

The global performance has been sensibly increased in the new application. In some cases, it has achieved 15 times of performance increase. For example, there was a batch updating that used to spend 48 hours on the UNISYS ClearPath NX processing. In the new platform, this application spends just 3 hours.

Real Success

There are many reasons for the EPM’s end users and IT professionals to be very proud and satisfied, as it is described below:

There is no interference between on line and batch processing as they use to have on the UNISYS mainframe environment.

Now, they distribute batch processing along the working day time. For this reason they could reduce significantly their billing cycle